Cecily Brown has created Night’s Noontime, 2020 an etching in an edition of 30, especially for Whitechapel Gallery to accompany the exhibition Radical Figures; Painting in the New Millennium, 2 February – 25 May 2020.
The violence of a country landscape is a subject that Cecily Brown has returned to many times in the last 20 years. Brown’s edition for the Whitechapel Gallery relates to her recent “Faeriefeller” series of paintings which portray battles in fairyland, an idyll shattered or something violent in a bucolic scene. In these works the field of vision is made up of a range of marks that stutter and jerk, or undulate like long grass and falling leaves.
Cecily Brown’s etching for the Whitechapel Gallery, takes it’s title from a poem by Richard Dadd, the great fairy painter. As in her paintings, blades of grass criss-cross the picture plane to fragment and “crack” the image, here they split and divide the plane and loop moments or painterly “incidents”. One sees trees and ground and sky; birds dead and alive; a boar’s head; a parade; a skirmish of cartoonish bodies; distant smoke and fire, ink congealing into figuration, animals in the act of disappearing.
For Brown the etching process encourages a wide range of marks and experimentation as do the different materials used. The artist collaborated with Two Palm’s Press, New York to create this new edition.
Cecily Brown (born London, 1969) lives and works in New York. After studying at the Slade School of Art in the early 1990’s, Cecily Brown left London where painting had fallen out of favour among her generation and settled in New York. Hovering between representation and a type of abstraction associated with the 1950’s New York action painters, Brown’s canvases blend bold brushwork, human figure, animals and elements from the landscape or setting.
Solo exhibitions have been held at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek, Denmark (2018); The Metropolitan Opera House, New York (2018); Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Sao Paulo; travelling to: Museo Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brazil; The Iberê Camargo Foundation, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2018); MCA Santa Barbara, CA (2018); The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2017) and The Drawing Center, New York. Her work is held in the collections of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York NY; The Tate Gallery, London, UK; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY among many others.
